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Veterans Speak: Older Boulder County vets learn to talk about suicide

By Alex Burness

Staff Writer

Posted:
11/04/2016 10:18:38 PM MDT

Updated:
11/04/2016 10:19:23 PM MDT

"This was a normal-health kid doing this. It was hard to understand that," Tom Daschofsky, above, commander of Post 32, said of Tyler Schlagel, a Longmont resident and Post 32 member who killed himself at the age of 29 last December. (Lewis Geyer / Staff Photographer)

When Ben Hedgpeth returned from two tours in Vietnam and another in the Mediterranean region, he didn't talk about what he'd seen and done, and he tried not to think about it, either.

He was in his 20s then, and for the most part his attempt at emotional suppression was successful.

"You're a young man, raising a family, working. Your whole day is filled," said Hedgpeth, now 71. "Your mind doesn't take time to dwell much on those things."

Over the years, he'd occasionally hear about someone he served with committing suicide, and he'd wonder why.

In the mid-1980s — 15 years after Hedgpeth's last tour — the nightmares started. Recognizing that he could no longer cope alone, he visited with a psychiatrist and began to open up about his trauma.

"I had gone on with my life until it got to the point that I couldn't handle it," Hedgpeth said. "I wasn't even really aware of any of the problems I had before that."

He's in therapy to this day, but veterans he knows — some of whom never got the kind of help he did — are still taking their own lives.

"It's terrible," Hedgpeth said. "Horrible."

It's a Monday night at American Legion Post 32 in Longmont, and he's sitting in a back room around a poker table with two other veterans his age who say they also wish someone had checked in on their mental health earlier.

"We come back from Vietnam and it was very anti-military," Craig Morrison said. "You didn't want to talk about it with anybody. You just kind of kept it to yourself, did your thing and got on with life."

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The fact that 20 veterans commit suicide and more than three times that number attempt it every day in this country is widely publicized at this point, as are related stories about depression and post-traumatic stress disorder among younger veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, it is older veterans suffering most from this troubling — albeit slowly improving — trend: Sixty-five percent of veteran suicides are done by people 50 or older.

Dr. Katy Barrs, clinic director of the Sturm Speciality in Military Psychology at the University of Denver, said that statistic is in part the product of a "generational affect."

"The younger veterans have been educated a lot more about suicide and mental health problems and readjustment," Barrs said. "Before, there was this idea of pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, and not much information about how to get help or that reduced the stigma around PTSD and suicide."

Log onto VA.gov today, and you'll find in the middle of the home page a tab with suicide prevention resources and the phone number to a crisis hotline.

The numbers also suggest that those who are less likely to seek help are more likely to attempt suicide; 70 percent of veterans who take their own lives were not in VA care, a figure that speaks to lingering distrust in the agency and in the reluctance of many to seek help.

Barrs believes much work remains to dismantle the parts of military culture that have pushed so many veterans — and particularly older ones — inward.

"There really has been for a long time in the military the idea that the greater good is more important than the individual good," she said. "That's a value instilled in training, and it make it difficult for people to stand up and say, 'I need help.'"

Ken Peters, a veteran of the Korean War and a poker buddy of Hedgpeth's, didn't stand up, as it were, until the '90s, when he began seeing a psychiatrist in Boulder who he said was valuable "beyond reproach."

The young veterans returning from the Middle East and heightening — often by tragic means — consciousness about suicide in the military have encouraged those from the Vietnam era to come forward, too, Peters said.

"It's good to see that it's finally happening, and that guys are getting the help that they need," he added.

Still, suicide and mental health are uncomfortable topics even for many of those veterans who are glad to see them being discussed more today.

It's Oct. 24 at Post 32, and the Broncos are set to kick off shortly. The post's bar is a quiet and friendly one, and the 20 or so people seated in it are willing and proud to recount their own military experiences.

They all know the name Tyler Schlagel, and all meet his mention with regretful headshakes and soft voices.

Tom Daschofsky, commander of Post 32, keeps a trailer about 75 yards from where Schlagel killed himself at a fishing lake in the Boulder foothills. Those who knew Schlagel casually thought there was nothing obviously wrong with him prior to the suicide, Daschofsky said.

"This was a normal-health kid doing this. It was hard to understand that," he said, adding that "we might be a little numb as to what's happening."

The American flag outside Post 32 was brought to half-mast when Schlagel died, and a few months before that when another member committed suicide. The flag flies there whenever a member dies, which these days is often.

"It sure seems like it's lowered a lot these days," Daschofsky said. "It's getting to be a constant."

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